I just wanted to invite anyone who's interested to join and contribute to the April 2024 Gall Week bioblitz:
It's a manual project so you'll need to join and manually add any galls you see during that time period. I hope some of you decide to contribute the under-studied galls of Africa to the project! If not I'll probably manually add contributions from this project to the bioblitz if I'm able to.
iNat has not made it easy, but it is possible to search for galls by the host species using their url search parameters. To start go to all observations in this project (or anywhere else really), in this example the URL is:
Each chunk of this url after the ? is a 'url parameter', and each parameter is separated with a &. So this url is using these three parameters:
To search for an Observation field you can use this parameter: field:Host=taxonId to the url string. The taxonId you need to use can be found in the url for the host species. Using White Milkwood Sideroxylon inerme as an example, that species URL is:
The ID is the number 3621751, so to search for any observations with that host species you can use this url
This is also why it's important to use the Host attribute when posting galls and other parasites. If you use some variation like Host ID or nothing at all we aren't able to search this way.
There is another way I use a lot, a hidden part of a taxon's UI which you can turn on with a different url parameter: test=interactions. This UI will add a new tab called Interactions to the taxon's page and it will fill up with data it gathered using attributes like Host:
About Interactions
Most organisms interact with other organisms in some way or another, and how they do so usually defines how they fit into an ecosystem. These interactions come to us from Global Biotic Interactions (GLoBI), a database and webservice that combines interaction data from numerous sources, including iNaturalist. You can actually contribute to this database by adding the "Eating", "Eaten by", and "Host" observation fields to observations that demonstrate those interactions.
This UI is not perfect, it's a little primitive, loads slowly and I've noticed sometimes species don't appear that I think should. But it has helped me find parasite information many times and I check it constantly. Using White Milkwood as the example again here is a direct link to the tab (the #interactions-tab tells the UI to open that tab directly saving you a click):
Here you will see a list of species under the heading hasHost, this list is populated by the Host field, but not other similar fields like Host ID, Host Plant, etc. In this case there are only two species listed.
So you can just copy and paste this string ?test=interactions#interactions-tab onto any iNat taxon URL to directly access this UI. I hope this helps you identify some galls!
The 4th Gall Week event is happening between Saturday, Sept 2nd and Sunday, Sept 10th. It would be great to get more representation from Africa so if you're interested please join and contribute! Here is more info from the project page:
In order to contribute to the project, please join the project, and add your observations manually. You can also do it in bulk if you upload it on your desktop computer.
From our 2021 project:
Don't forget to add information about the host plant if you can. You can add it as a note, or even better, in the field
Host. You can also link to the host plant observation if you're not sure what it was.
I wanted to share this Gall Week event and project with anyone in Africa who would like to participate:
Following two successful fall Gall Week events, let's try a spring gall event! Please mark your calendars: we will document observations between April 15-23, 2023. For more info and updates, please join the new project - https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/gall-week-spring-2023
Gall Week is a gall focused iNaturalist bio blitz which is organized by some folks in North America. Most participants won't be from the African continent but it would be nice to get a little more international diversity in their projects and it could be fun to get more eyes on the much lesser known African galls!
I encourage you to join the project and add any observations you made from April 15-23.
Have fun!
